Everyone wants a piece of Christopher .Columbus. Towns across Europe claim to be his birthplace, nations dispute who really has his remains and cultures clash over whether to commend or condemn him. For five centuries, he has been a symbol of exploration, continental exchange and European supremacy, his life embellished and employed as a proxy for contemporary concerns. 

Conscious of his subject’s contentiousness, Matthew Restall tries to separate the flesh-and-blood Columbus from the Columbus of legend and symbol in his new biography. He explores the paradoxes, debunks enduring myths and examines the ways the explorer’s legacy has been used and contested.

Columbus was born as Cristoforo Colombo in 1451 in Genoa, a powerful port city and a European financial centre. He was the son of a weaver, and the family business was likely to have been tied to serving the Genoese merchant elite. Columbus left the city in his early twenties, probably to sell his father’s wool along the eastern Atlantic. He aspired to social advancement and his self-declared motive was to earn a noble title.

From the mid-1470s to the mid-1480s, Columbus was based in Lisbon. He married into the lower ranks of the Portuguese nobility and traded and transported sugar from Madeira. He also sailed down the West African coast as far as Elmina (in modern-day Ghana) and conveyed enslaved people to Portugal. 

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